IT business idea startup

[eek]

Whys that? Too much central control? Or too risk-adverse?

The secondary school that some of my kids go to use SAAS system for booking the parents evenings. It's all right, but technically could be a lot better. Looks like the type of app would take around 2 - 3 months to produce a decent version.

I looked into the company running it.

They are an Australian outfit. The charging model is quite interesting. It is around £175 for a single parents night. No contracts etc. And they claim to have 2k schools using it ( USA, UK, Canada, Aus & New Zealand ) .

If their numbers are true then they could easily be looking at £1M per year in revenue.

You think too much. I was thinking more about contacting and selling to the schools. Been there seen the pain parentpay suffered and decided to find another product and market

[Barry Jihad]

Unlikely.

Amateur porn online for free has done for a lot of the industry; torrenting professional films has cost the industry lots as well.

The film industry bangs on about how people downloading a film hits them, but there will always be people who want the social experience of going to the cinema. However, the number of people who want the social experience of going to a cinema to watch porn is much more of a niche market.

I cannot imagine anyone wanting to go to a cinema to get his old fella out & give it a good slap while sitting next to a couple eating popcorn.

[tomtomagain]

You think too much.

I'll take that as the compliment you undoubtedly meant it to be.

I have been working on my "Plan B" full-time now for 9 months. it's a software product that i wrote and sell.

I've sold it to companies in pretty much every sector, churches, charities, schools, universities, hospitals, big companies, small companies and 95% of my sales are outside the UK .... and whilst that sounds great because it's a "big market" in reality it's a bit of a pain.

Because it can be used by anyone its really hard to target the marketing. It's hard to define the pricing, marketing material and language when you sell something to organisations as diverse as the US military and the local charity.

That's why I like the "schools" idea. It would be great to be able to focus the marketing on a well defined niche. "All" you'd have to do is to open the yellow pages and phone them up.

Having said that ..... I'm not going to implement it .... but would gladly use it!